Book review: Time for Socialism
Hi all – below is the text version of our book review of Thomas Piketty’s “Time for Socialism“. The video can be found here. Would be keen for thoughts, and if there are other books people want reviewed.
Read moreVideo: What can we do with GDP
Hey team,
I realised that a lot of the videos going up presuppose knowledge about what GDP is and what the purpose of GDP is – but after hearing another series of people baselessly criticise GDP I realised that assuming this knowledge isn’t really the best place to start.
So I popped a video up at the start of the “Data and Aggregates” playlist that is just about what the point of GDP is.
Read more
Video: Leaky buckets and inequality
Today’s video is on Okun’s leaky bucket – a metaphor that is used to describe how we would think about a trade-off between transfer resources and the total number of resources.
Such a metaphor for considering this trade-off is useful – but as Matt has noted in the past we should be very very cautious about overinterpreting this example when looking at real economic data. Hence why I got him to chat about that at the end.
Read moreVideo: Capital explained in under 10mins!
I’ve just popped up a video where I am to explain what “capital” is, in terms of a factor of production in an economic sense, in under 10 minutes.
The goal was to work out what capital is (and isn’t), to describe the difference between tangible and intangible capital, and to give a feeling for how we can add up quite different capital items.
Hopefully outlining what capital is will make the research discussed here and published here a bit more useful.
Keen for your thoughts 🙂
Read moreThe story of JM the lawnmower: Productivity and unemployment
This week Matt and me followed around a lawnmower man to figure out what productivity and unemployment are – and how we would think about measuring them. Feel free to give these videos a watch below 🙂
Video: Economic growth
In this video I outline the structure for thinking about economic growth – and point out how much of society’s progress has been due to our knowledge, organisation, and specialisation due to scale rather than unsustainable resource use.
Hope it is an issue I can go more deeply on soon.